ror.org/00yn2fy02
Abstracts
Abstract
The Portland Book Festival, originally known as “Wordstock,” is the main annual literary event in Portland, Oregon. It is also an increasingly prominent literary festival in the United States. The branding shift from “Wordstock” to “Portland Book Festival” in 2018 unearths key tensions, hierarchies, subversions, and cultural changes in the communicative and social functions of the Festival. The essay identifies transactional and transformative aspects of the Festival. Bank of America’s festival-naming “title” sponsorship, the partnership of cultural heritage organizations, and Portland place branding offer transactional stability for the Festival, where parties give and get in kind. The Festival’s temporary affective bonds and their social media documentation facilitate transformational experiences that reinscribe hierarchies of centre/periphery. The name change fosters a more democratic and accessible festival experience. This article takes a multimethod approach, triangulating sentiment analysis of tweets from the 2017 and 2018 Festivals, a survey of 2018 Portland Book Festival attendees, and interviews with prominent stakeholders in the Festival rebranding.
Keywords:
- Portland Book Festival,
- literary festival,
- liveness,
- place-based marketing,
- book discovery
Résumé
Le Festival du livre de Portland (Portland Book Festival), appelé Wordstock à sa création, est la principale manifestation littéraire annuelle de Portland (Oregon) et est en voie de devenir l’un des festivals littéraires les plus en vue des États-Unis. Le passage de « Wordstock » au « Portland Book Festival », en 2018, est révélateur des tensions, des hiérarchies, des subversions et des changements culturels à l’oeuvre dans les fonctions communicative et sociale du Festival. Le présent article identifie les aspects transactionnels et transformatifs de ce dernier. D’une part, la présence d’un commanditaire en titre, Bank of America, le partenariat avec des organismes voués au patrimoine culturel et l’image de marque de Portland confèrent une stabilité transactionnelle au Festival, en vertu de laquelle les parties à la fois donnent et reçoivent. D’autre part, les liens affectifs temporaires se créant lors du Festival et la façon dont ils sont documentés sur les réseaux sociaux soutiennent des expériences transformationnelles qui réinscrivent les hiérarchies centre/périphérie. Le changement de nom du Festival favorise une expérience plus démocratique, plus accessible. L’article s’appuie sur une approche multiméthode, par la triangulation d’une analyse de sentiments des tweets publiés en 2017 et de 2018, d’un sondage réalisé auprès des visiteurs de l’édition 2018 et d’entretiens avec diverses parties prenantes au changement d’image du Festival.
Mots-clés :
- Festival du livre de Portland,
- festival littéraire,
- animation,
- commercialisation sur place,
- découverte du livre
Appendices
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